Hmmm. Well, we were a bit slow to catch on to just
how gifted.
Both my DH and I are HG+, though, so yeah, it wasn't a big surprise that DD would be gifted. That, we sort of expected.
We might should have known from birth, though. L&D physician and nurses claimed that they'd "never seen" a child so alert
at birth. She was definitely hitting milestones early-- as in, in some cases the developmental timeline just didn't seem to apply to her in a linear fashion.
She started wildly pointing and grinning like mad at her "kitty" when she was just a couple of months old (this was our cat who would leap onto the kitchen windowsill to 'visit' with us in the kitchen), and looking back into videos of her, she was clearly using symbolic (albeit garbled... gee, thanks, endless ear infections) language to identify and communicate about said cat from 5-6 months. I picked up on that at about 7 months.
She had this weirdly gentle and careful pincer grasp from about four months old-- I remember this because she used to play with earrings on whoever would pick her up. She was very gentle-- never-- ever-- any tugging.
She was so intensely
observant and had an incredibly memory for things even as a very young baby. My mother-in-law got her a tiny Casio keyboard (just a couple of octaves) for her first Christmas, and it quickly became one of her favorite toys. She never 'pounded' on it-- she was very careful. We got her a LeapPad when she was not quite two-- she was always just so careful.
We moved when she was 18 months old-- and left behind her (by then beloved) kitty. At that point, the cat had acquired the habit of leaping into the bathroom windowsill to 'visit' with DD during bathtime and teeth brushing. The two of them would snuggle up to either side of the window-- it was very sweet, and they clearly adored one another. After our move, DD was angry and agitated that our new bathroom window was too small and too high in the wall to allow for her "kitty" to come to her. She was inconsolable for weeks, only relenting when we explained that her kitty was still in MN, living with her old nanny, and promised that as soon as we'd moved into our new house, we'd get her another kitty. From then on-- bam-- she was fine with it, though she pestered us about a "new kitty" pretty regularly. She would still talk about missing her kitty, but without the dispirited affect.
I think that was when we KNEW that she was not just 'different' but maybe even WAY different. Shortly after that is when she started doing things that were socially so far beyond normative that there was no denying it. This was the same child that asked me about God, death, evil, ignorance, racism, prejudice, altruism, money, etc. at every opportunity. I'm reasonably certain now that most 3 yo children are not doing those things. My friends whose kids are contemporaries looked at me like I had three heads when I'd even
hint at (or grossly underplay) the kinds of things she was curious about.
She was very interested in learning to read, for example... and knew all of her basic phonemes and blends by about two. My mom (a professional educator) managed to convince us that we should do whatever we could to "prevent" her from reading before kindergarten. We carefully screened her LeapPad selections, removing those which seemed to encourage phonics... Yeah, yeah-- I know. Hindsight. LOL. Yes, a K-3 teacher actually told me to stop reading aloud to my daughter so much, that she was "perfectly normal" and not to worry about her since we were "pressuring her" to do things too early. Sheesh.
When we finally DID relent and teach her decoding, it took about 12 hours and she went on to sustained silent reading pretty much immediately. Within a month, she was reading at about a middle 2nd grade level, and within four months, she was reading anything and everything from our bookshelves. When she was six (and placed as a third grader), the school tested her Lexile (she had been reading about 19-20 months at that point) and it was 1350+. That made it very clear to the school that we weren't making anything up, anyway, but it surprised even us.
I note that last bit because DD's
rate of acquisition/mastery has always been-- well, almost superhuman. It isn't that she doesn't need instruction. She's not an autodidact the way some kids are. She's completely Socratic, in fact. It's that she's like a Nuclear Reactor whereas most NT kids are woodstoves. This is one reason why even being PG, she doesn't always SEEM 'that smart' until you suddenly realize that you're discussing _______ with a child who is ____ and give yourself a mental shake. It causes cognitive dissonance in most people because she's always been incredibly easy to talk to-- VERY easy for adults to forget that she's a child because she slowly turns up the cognitive heat until you're sort of seamlessly talking to her the way you would another adult, leaving you wondering "what the heck...."??
I'm not sure that there WAS a single moment of epiphany. It was more like coming to terms with just where she's at on the gifted spectrum. I'm still not sure we're all the way there yet. Maybe someday.
